Agency

14 Qamishli

Later that evening, Rainey and the nanny having taken Thomas for a stroll, Netherton lay on the bed, speaking with Lowbeer. Who’d phoned, as she tended to do, as soon as he was alone.

“So you don’t know whether there’s a Eunice, your software agent, here in our past?” he asked, staring up at a bifurcated crack he’d only recently noticed in the ceiling. Was it an actual crack, or an assembler artifact, positioned by an algorithm to suggest authenticity? If Rainey were to notice it, he’d decided, he’d argue for it being a crack, since an assembler artifact would disappoint her.

“We assume so,” Lowbeer said. “I’ve an appointment tomorrow, though, with Clovis Fearing, to see what she might have on it. I’ll take you along, if you like.” Meaning he was going.

Fearing, an American contemporary of Lowbeer’s, was someone Netherton had met shortly after meeting Lowbeer herself. Though he hadn’t seen her since, he’d meanwhile come to know her much younger self in the county, a phlegmatic expert gunfighter he assumed would still be in charge of Flynne’s personal security. “How is she?”

“Medical issues, requiring compound phage therapy, but she’s sufficiently back in circulation that I’ve asked her to look into Eunice.”

“She still has the shop, in Portobello?”

“The Clovis Limit, yes. Says the stock’s become the better part of her memory.”

“Have you inquired in the county? Your younger self, there, has every sort of Washington connection. Including presidential, currently.”

“Of course,” Lowbeer said, “but nothing turned up.”

Getting up, Netherton padded into the kitchen in his stocking feet. “Espresso,” he said to their maker, something Rainey generally wouldn’t allow him to do, insisting he make it himself. “Decaf,” he added, remembering but obeying another of her rules. “So you’ve encouraged this AI to increase its own functionality. Is that all?” Watching the maker pump a tiny stream of steaming caffeine-free espresso into the waiting cup.

“Yes,” Lowbeer said, “though that seems a basic part of the package with her, increasing agency. I must mention, though, that the aunties currently estimate that Eunice’s stub may be ending, at least for our purposes. So we’ve that to consider as well.”

“Ending?” Netherton took his first bitter sip, assuming he’d misheard.

“Yes,” said Lowbeer.

“Pardon me,” Netherton said, “but ‘ending’?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Nuclear war.”

“Ash mentioned something, but I didn’t imagine it was that serious,” Netherton said, looking down at the steaming black liquor in the small white china cup, the kitchen’s ceiling fixture reflected in it, surrounded by pale brown crema.

“It’s extremely serious. Qamishli,” Lowbeer said. “The crisis began there, though of course it’s playing out more broadly.”

Like a name from one of Thomas’s storybooks. But then he remembered more of what Ash had said. “Would that be in Turkey?”

“Syria. A town near the Turkish border, in the northeast, across from the Turkish city of Nusaybin. A complicated place, even by the standards of the region in that day.”

Netherton drank off his decaf, the gesture as denatured as the brew, and returned the cup to the maker. “Would that be your work, then, this crisis?”

“Most definitely not. It came with the territory, taking us entirely by surprise. Vespasian’s final stub promises to become exactly the sort of thing he most enjoyed inflicting.”

“Can you prevent it?”

“That depends on our available agency there. At the moment, we’ve none. The aunties give it grim odds.”

“You told me they weren’t involved.”

“Not in the sense you’re accustomed to, but there are no better actuaries.”